Will you believe me if I say we only came here to take an exam?
Maybe if you know us well 
  But we didn’t dare to explain our motivation to any local, in a country where the immigration form’s first three reasons for visit are wedding, honeymoon and fishing.
As Yang Ke’s exam fell during the period of our Cuba visit, we only had the choice between Jamaica and Bahamas as close-by (and visa-free!) locations. After a few months of South American winter we were starting to miss our South East Asian tropical islands and were very looking forward to some warm beach holiday. Cuba itself has a few nice options with good snorkeling/diving spots, decent beaches and affordable all-inclusive hotels, but we decided to spend our Cuba time on sightseeing instead and reward Yang Ke for her hard studying with a longer Bahamas stay.
Cuba and the Bahamas are only one flight hour apart, but couldn’t be more different. Coming from the rather chaotic Havana airport, where we nearly missed our flight because we were forced to book our return flight before boarding and had to pay in cash with no working ATM around, and then the immigration officers didn’t know sh** about visa rules for Chinese and only let us pass after involving several bosses and multiple lecturings how wrong we were.
Anyway, in comparison arriving in Nassau was like arriving in a five star hotel lobby. A live band was playing in the background and the immigration officers were sitting in very open, spacious and light wood colored desks, passing me my two-weeks (plus-minus) visa approval with a friendly welcome.
We arrived a few days before Yang Ke’s exam to give us a bit of safety buffer and give her a few more days of full time preparation, and settled down on Paradise Island, a popular beach location in proximity of downtown Nassau (the capital of Bahamas). The island is dominated by the huge Atlantis Hotel, an entertainment packed all-inclusive hotel, which actually had some very attractive promotions during the hurricane season, but we opted for a more study-conducive, small, time-sharing villa resort.
Our comfy apartment came with a kitchen, something we usually don’t give much value to, but which we became to extremely appreciate ones we realized the Mars-like exorbitant restaurant and taxi prices around Nassau! The first time since our 5 months travelling that we felt obliged to brush-up our cooking skills.
Overall we were not very impressed by Nassau and Paradise Island. The city center is not unpleasant, but mostly catered to the huge cruise ships arriving every day, looking for tax-free shopping, and is suffering from a strong increase in crime over the last year or two. The beaches are quite nice, but not very well taken care off and the sea was too rough for swimming (might be due to the season).
So we were keen to change to another more idyllic island once Yang Ke had finished her exam.
(Btw. actuary doesn’t seem to be a popular profession on the Bahamas – she was the only participant during the whole exam session!)
We decided on the island Eleuthera as our next destination and booked a flight with cute Pineapple Air.
Unfortunately we soon had to find out why September and October are low season!
We started to hear people talk about this Joaquin, and it didn’t sound like they were talking about a new singer or moviestar.
No, much more brutal. Joaquin was the new class 3 hurricane which had turned up out of nowhere and was heading towards the Bahamas.
Time to do some studying in preparation for our first hurricane experience!
Turns out there are only five hurricane levels and level three is already pretty badass. Joaquin later turned level four and became the strongest hurricane since 2010!
Hurricane prediction models are quite decent nowadays but still have a large cone of uncertainty. They totally failed to predict the creation of this hurricane in the first place. They predicted that Joaquin would hit Bahamas’ south eastern Islands bad and then slowly turn northwards, which it did. They predicted that it would make landfall on US eastern coast (why a lot of US flights were canceled), which it didnt.
Nassau is usually spared the worst as it is surrounded by many other Islands where hurricanes loose their force and we only had strong winds and some road flooding. We were however more concerned about our new destination which was predicted to be in Joaquin’s path, but very luckily it changed its path last minute, just enough to avoid major damage. In the end we only had to delay our flight by one day and arrived as first guests at the hotel, just reopening from its lock-down.
We remained only guests for a whole day making the already very peaceful hotel even more tranquil.
Eleuthera is a very thin and long stretched island with only small settlements dating back to the 17th century. Despite its long coastal line with beautiful beaches it has only very few hotels and instead has attracted several US stars, making it their holiday home.
We mostly relaxed at beach and pool and only rented a car for one day to visit cute Harbor island with its famous pink beach.
Having a car would be quite an overkill for such a small island and the locals have resorted to the clever idea of using golf carts instead
The big highlight of Harbour Island is however the pink beach, which stretches all along the 5km coast, getting its color from crushed pink seashells
Apart from its cute color we found its powder like sand as impressive. The sand is extremely fine and we had good fun playing around with it 
On the way to our hotel the main island gets very narrow and at one point has totally eroded, now only being covered by a short bridge, the “Glass Window Bridge”, allowing the merging of the light blue Caribbean sea with the dark blue Atlantic ocean resulting in an amazing spectacle of colors.
The culinary specialty of Eleuthera is conch, large sea-snails with a crunchy texture, which are prepared as fritters or as salad. Especially for the salad it is important to have fresh conch from the day, which is no problem on the island where they are available in abundance.
Overall we had a great relaxing time on Eleuthera and found it so much better than Nassau. Apart from the beautiful beaches with crystal clear waters and snorkeling opportunities, there are a few interesting day excursions, by car or even by bicycle and the locals are extremely cheerful and helpful.
